Winner of the Swedish Crime Academy Award for Best Crime Novel, international sensation Kjell Eriksson has quickly built a name for himself in the United States. In this highly acclaimed follow-up to The Cruel Stars of the Night, Manuel Alavez’s life is in ruins. One of his brothers is dead, the other is in jail, and the man who double-crossed both men is running a high-class successful restaurant. A series of dramatic events inevitably leads to murder, and Inspector Ann Lindell is forced to sample many fine meals at the restaurant as she attempts to thwart a cunning killer.

The Cruel Stars of the Night
Kjell Eriksson
St. Martin’s Minotaur
ISBN 978-0-312-36668-1
29 April 2008
$14.50 in Canada

Original Title: Nattens grymma stjärnor

Winner of the Swedish crime Academy Award for Best Crime Novel, Kjell Eriksson received wide critical acclaim for his U.S. debut, the international bestseller The Princess of Burundi. Now, this spectacular follow-up thriller opens with the abrupt disappearance of an elderly professor, followed quickly by the suspicious deaths of two more old men. Inspector Ann Lindell instinctively knows that she is tracking a most cunning serial killer, and as she closes in on the demented murderer, a diabolical death trap awaits.

In The Demon of Dakar, Ann Lindell and her motley crew of colleagues are faced with a most baffling murder case in which all clues lead straight back to a popular local restaurant named Dakar. The owner, Slobodan Andersson, has some shady connections in his past, and his partner’s reputation is equally murky.

The kitchen crew is not above suspicion, either. The meat chef is an oddball, to say the least, while unbeknownst to the rest, the newest hire’s personal life is a tangled web of lies. Even Eva Willman, the seemingly blameless older woman returning to the workforce as a waitress, has skeletons in her closet.

And then the tension rachets up a number of notches as it becomes apparent that one murder has not satisfied the killer in the least. If Ann is to prevent a bloodbath at Restaurant Dakar, she must match wits with a killer whose motives are seemingly completely obscure.

But the reader knows the killer well. His crimes are justified from his point of view. Not only that, he’s a very likable fellow who is only looking for justice. As in all of Kjell Eriksson’s compelling spellbinders, though, justice entails a frantic race to the finish, a race without rules and fraught with danger.